Serial Interview: Christopher Golden

Three months ago, Christopher Golden and I began a serial interview. Every Monday throughout the summer, I posted one new segment here at my blog. Throughout the course of our discussion, we've talked about his books, his writing habits, his favorite comics, and his love of The Wrong Trousers, among other things. Today, we're wrapping up the serial interview* with a Q&A focusing on his next YA release, Soulless, which comes out in October.

I'm going to say this very loudly right now and keep saying it until I'm blue in the face: If you like zombie movies and horror stories, you must read Soulless by Christopher Golden. As some of my favorite customers might say, this book is made of awesome. It's scary, it's action-packed, it's - oh, I'll save that for the review. I'm going to go talk to Chris now.

The dead come back to (un)life in Soulless. What prompted this macabre tale?

I find it interesting that our pop culture is so fascinated with
zombies this decade, and I wonder if the reason movies about the war in
Iraq
fail and horror entertainment about the undead and torture are
successful
has to do with the way we're processing war and death now. The current
generation of teens doesn't remember what the world was like before
9/11.
The constant low-grade fear of terrorism is a part of their lives in a
way
that the Cold War was a part of my youth. In SOULLESS, I suggest that
teenagers in 2008 are *ready* for catastrophe in a way that my
generation
wasn't. They're almost expecting disaster, and thanks to Hurricane
Katrina,
they have zero expectation that the government will be ready to help
them
when it comes.

Talk to me about the human characters that populate Soulless.

Phoenix is about to start college, but right now she's on a book
tour
with her father, a history professor and spiritual medium, with whom
she has
a very strained relationship. Matt and Noah are students at UMass
Amherst
who couldn't be more opposite from one another, but who are forced to
rely
on each other to survive. Jack is a Bronx kid, a member of a street
gang
called Smoke Dragons, with a lot of people wanting to hurt him even
before
the "uprising." And then there's Tania...she's a former
Disney/Nickelodeon
tween princess trying to launch the next phase of her career, while
dealing
with being outed as a lesbian in the major media and the breakup of a
longterm relationship. The weird thing about the Tania story is that I
came
up with that before Lindsay Lohan started her current maybe-lesbian
relationship. Tania, though, is actually heartbroken and trying to
deal.

And the zombies? How did they become re-animated?

Phoenix's father, Professor Cormier, has written a book outlining
the
relationship between the spirit and soul, which he considers two
entirely
different things. This is not a new theory. Some societies have
espoused
such beliefs before. The idea is that the soul is the spark of
divinity and
that it returns to that divinity when the body dies. The spirit is the
cumulative experience and personality of the individual -- their
persona -- and
often times that remains behind and becomes what we know of as ghosts.
But
it's the soul that provides the fundamental decency and conscience, and
when
the spirits are accidentally returned to their hollow bodies WITHOUT
their
souls -- animating them with what we'll call ectoplasm and sheer force of
will -- they have only two desires...they want to see the loved ones they
left
behind, and they want to fill the hollowness inside them. When those
two
desires come together . . . you get zombies.

What's your general opinion of seances, in real life?

Well, the new X-Files movie tanked, but I've been using its
subtitle
most of my life. I WANT TO BELIEVE. I've never seen or experienced
anything that has convinced me that spirits are real, but I'd like to.
I
*did* take a photograph in France a few years ago that any rational
person
would have to agree seems to show a specter of some kind. But it isn't
incontrovertible proof, and that's what I'd need.

Soulless is your first book published by MTV Books.
How did you get involved with that imprint?

The editor there, Jennifer Heddle, is someone I've known for a
while
and with whom I've worked before, though not for MTV Books. I had the
idea
for SOULLESS, and I asked. :)

And finally: Zombies vs. unicorns? (This question was
going around author blogs last year. It's like Batman
vs. Superman -- take it as you will, with who is better
or stronger or who would win.)